An argent lion rampant: coats of arms in 17th-c. books
In recent months, the Folger Shakespeare Library added a rare emblem book to its holdings, a thin quarto bound in pasteboards holding 24 unnumbered leaves . The emblem book presents itself as a “new year’s gift” containing 13 engravings: one coat…
Let's make a model!
Co-written by Heather Wolfe and Jana Dambrogio In 2010, Jana Dambrogio and I were thinking independently about slits and stabs in early modern letters. Jana, after having had made many models of the letters of Tomaso di Livieri from the…
Fun in cataloging, or, the mysterious 12mo
On occasion, interesting and unusual aspects of books, manuscripts, and prints catch the attention of the cataloger at work on them. One such item was written up by Sarah Werner last December in “‘Tis the season for almanacs.” The office of the…
Hidden notes, "bibliographic nightmares," and STC call numbers
Sometimes when keyword searching Hamnet, the results include mystery matches: when you Ctrl-V to find the word you’re looking for on the page, it’s not there. That’s because some fields only display on the “MARC view” tab. Usually the information isn’t worth…
Four states of Shakespeare: the Droeshout portrait
So the mysterious eye of this month’s crocodile belongs to no other than Shakespeare, as some readers immediately recognized: Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare on the title page of the First Folio More specifically, it is Shakespeare’s left right eye as depicted…
Steady sellers
Recently, Jan van de Kamp, a scholar from the Netherlands, contacted me with the question of whether I knew a method to extract all religious steady sellers from the Short Title Catalogue, Netherlands (STCN). He would like to use that…
Making a Karibari board
In conservation, the drying or humidification of paper poses particular challenges when dimensional and visual characteristics of the original paper are to be retained. Because of this, the drying of an artifact is a key step in its treatment. There…
Timon of Athens: nine not-actually-lost drawings by Wyndham Lewis
In 1998, modernist art and literature scholar Paul Edwards wrote about “a set of watercolours and (apparently) ink drawings on the theme of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens” by Wyndham Lewis that had been published as a portfolio in 1913. Paul Edwards, “Wyndham…
Click-clack and crocodile tears: an annotated Elizabethan dictionary
If dictionaries are still on your mind after reading in The Collation and elsewhere about the 1580 copy of John Baret’s Alvearie owned by George Koppelman and Dan Wechsler, then here’s another tri-lingual annotated dictionary to ponder: the intensively-annotated Folger copy of John…
Abbreviations and signatures
As Sjoerd Levelt guessed in the comments, this month’s crocodile image featured an abbreviation, rather than a letter, in the signature mark: sig. 22Here’s a longer look at what this character is and how it ended up being used in…
A peek into the Conservation Lab
Ever wonder what the conservators are up to on our third floor? Here’s a peek into what’s happening in the Werner Gundersheimer Conservation Laboratory this month: The team is in full treatment mode for the Library’s upcoming exhibition, “Symbols of Honor: Heraldry…
Buzz or honey? Shakespeare's Beehive raises questions
Shakespeare’s birthday week begins with a bang: two New York booksellers, George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler, announced that they have found Shakespeare’s dictionary. In their new book, Shakespeare’s Beehive, Koppelman and Wechsler present their reasons for believing that William Shakespeare…